AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book is a work of fiction. However, much of the story is true. The orphan asylum still exists, though the building, which is now being used as a memory care facility, is in much better condition today than when I began working on this tale.

The Victoria Hall disaster, one of the worst in England’s history, resulted in the needless deaths of 183 children. The entertainment involved the occult. The Great Ghost Illusion was the featured act of the day.

The owner of the theater, Frederick Taylor, was well known for his generosity to the poor. Free tickets for the boys in the orphanage, only half a mile away, would have been likely.

On a better note, as a consequence of the tragedy, eight years after it happened, a young engineer named Robert Alexander Briggs, fifteen years old when he survived the disaster, patented a design for a bolt that would keep a door secure from anyone trying to enter from outside while still enabling those inside to escape.

It was the first version of the panic bar we see on emergency exits today. Since the adoption of Robert Briggs’s invention, hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives have been saved.

The best possible tribute to the children who died that day.